Full Description
Part ethnography, part history, and part memoir, this volume chronicles the complex past and dynamic present of an ancient Mizrahi community. While intimately tied to the Central Asian landscape, the Jews of Bukhara have also maintained deep connections to the wider Jewish world. As the community began to disperse after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alanna E. Cooper traveled to Uzbekistan to document Jewish life before it disappeared. Drawing on ethnographic research there as well as among immigrants to the US and Israel, Cooper tells an intimate and personal story about what it means to be Bukharan Jewish. Together with her historical research about a series of dramatic encounters between Bukharan Jews and Jews in other parts of the world, this lively narrative illuminates the tensions inherent in maintaining Judaism as a single global religion over the course of its long and varied diaspora history.
Contents
Preface: Reining in Diaspora's Margins
Acknowledgments
Part 1. Introduction
1. First Encounter: Bukharan Jewish Immigrants in an Ashkenazi School in New York
2. Writing Bukharan Jewish History: Memory, Authority, and Peoplehood
Part 2. Eighteenth-Century Conversations
3. An Emissary from the Holy Land in Central Asia
4. Revisiting the Story of the Emissary from the Holy Land
Part 3. Nineteenth-Century Conversations
5. Russian Colonialism and Central Asian Jewish Routes
6. A Matter of Meat: Local and Global Religious Leaders in Conversation
7. Building a Neighborhood and Constructing Bukharan Jewish Identity
Part 4. Twentieth-Century Conversations
8. Local Jewish Forms
9. International Jewish Organizations Encounter Local Jewish Community Life
10. Varieties of Bukharan Jewishness
11. Negotiating Authenticity and Identity: Bukharan Jews Encounter Each Other and the Self
12. Jewish History as a Conversation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
